SAP Co-Innovation Lab Projects - Virtualization & Cloud Computing

The SAP Global Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) Network hosts and facilitates a broad range of events and activities to foster project based co-innovation, enabling and extend the capabilities of our partners and SAP. Joint achievements of projects are showcased as packaged deliverables to gain broader momentum around their co-innovation and to make the topic more tangible. The COIL projects pages provide further insight.

The following list outlines a high-level perspective for the major projects successfully completed between 2008 and today in the area of virtualization and cloud computing.

Flexibility in virtualized SAP software landscapes is an increasingly important and desirable capability for IT managers to support business goals beyond server consolidation. Previous barriers to live migrations using VMware VMotion across generations of servers have been solved with Intel VT FlexMigration and VMware Enhanced VMotion. IT managers can now get benefits of investment protection for SAP software installations with enlarged resource pools across multiple generations of Intel Xeon processor-based servers. Access the Automated Disaster Recovery with Intel and VMWare solution brief for further information.

Site Recovery Manager

with VMware and NetApp [COIL Palo Alto, May 2009]

Given the complexity of today's IT environments and the business risks of downtime, data loss, and failure, no one can afford to operate without a robust and well-tested disaster recovery (DR) plan for critical systems. However, maintaining an idle data center is not an economically viable option. Further, testing of the DR plan can be costly, complex, and disruptive.

Now, VMware and NetApp have teamed up with SAP to take the risk, worry, and complexity out of DR for your SAP software landscape by providing a solution that makes disaster recovery manageable, reliable, repeatable, and cost effective. The results of the projects have been published as Solution Brief and can be viewed within an overview screencam.

Leveraging solutions from Intel, VMWare, NetApp, Cisco and expertise from Zacatii Consulting a real-life disaster recovery scenario was simulated between Tokyo (COIL Tokyo Data Center) and the recovery site in Osaka (SAP Japan's Western Japan Branch Office). The verification was conducted in environment close to the customer's hands-on, where the operating site was placed physicall in Tokyo (at COIL Tokyo Data Center) and the recovery site physically in Osaka (at SAP Japan's Western Japan Branch Office). The SAP sales management transactions were conducted consistently and differential data were transferred to the recovery site every hour through a regular internet connection. This verified the capability of the solution to be used in a common internet environment in remote locations. Making use of virtualization in Disaster Recovery Solution allows customers to be released from the need of installing a system at the recovery site similar to the real environment, and enables them to expand the use of the recovery site in non-disaster situations. Green IT aspects have been addressed along with cost reduction, by introducing the latest server with improved performance and increased power-saving capability to the recovery site.

Information on the entire project setup and architecture, as well as subsequent phases can be found on the dedicated COIL Tokyo Disaster Recovery homepage. This project has been part of COILs contribution to Sustainability.

F5 has cooperated with multiple partners in SAP Co-innovation Lab to showcase what critical role its BigIP product family can play in disaster recovery scenarios with virtualized SAP landscape. The project developed two customer solutions which were demonstrated to a large audience of the SAP Virtualization Week in April 2009:

Teaming up with NetApp and VMWare, F5 demonstrated how to use its BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager and Global Traffic Manager to enhance automation in disaster recovery scenario, including failover to a secondary data center

Working side by side with VMWare, F5 and COIL engineers integrated F5 Local Traffic Manager with VMware AppSpeed to demonstrate how customers using SAP Portal can build for nominal use, while still being agile enough to handle a surge in traffic to meet established SLA's.

Citrix Delivery Center Disaster Recovery PoC

with Citrix [COIL Palo Alto, March 2009]

Citrix and SAP Co-innovation Lab have teamed up to build a proof of concept to demonstrate how to use Citrix Delivery Center in a virtualized SAP environment to achieve high availability and disaster recovery. The results of this project were presented to the audience of the SAP Virtualization Week 2009, and following Citrix capabilities were sucessfully demonstrated:

Businesses need to implement ways to quickly recover their operation, in order to smoothly continue business, after their IT systems have been interrupted through disasters, such as, earthquakes, fires, or other emergencies. Disaster recovery solutions provide an environment to facilitate the latter. Intel, NetApp, VMware and COIL Tokyo jointly verified the configuration and operation for an efficient recovery environment based on specific hardware and software installments.

The project confirmed that:

a sophisticated SAP system setup on one single server (including ECC, BI, EP, XI and MDM) can smoothly be started at primary and recovery site.

all transactions occurring on the primary site are reflected 1:1 on the recovery site.

the amount of services on the recovery site is possible, through utilization of the Intel Xeon processor 7400 series

Upgrades to SAP's latest software release show strong momentum worldwide in enterprises large and small.

The reason? ERP 6.0 delivers on promise on SAP's new service-oriented architecture paradigm since it offers service bundles to compose novel business applications. In order to minimize the costs of ERP upgrades is a steady challenge to many IT departments. With the advent of virtualization, compelling new procedures for ERP upgrading can easily be applied.

The impact? No matter whether or not the final production system itself will be operated in a virtualized environment, the concept of virtualization represented by state-of-the-art solutions such as VMware's ESX server, provide the means to cut down upgrade hardware costs for intermediate upgrade steps. Even more important, with successive snapshots at decisive upgrade steps, it is easy to step back to any snapshot that had been taken.This new capability enables the validation of support package implementation and verification of additional procedures before the final "real" upgrade actually takes place. Overall, these new capabilities represent important progress compared to the traditional upgrade procedure, in terms of flexibility and risk mitigation, resulting in lower cost.

SAP's Co-Innovation Lab Tokyo teamed up with VMware Japan to evaluate these new capabilities. In the lab's data center, the joint SAP/VMware team upgraded an R/3 Enterprise (Extension 2000) system with a MS SQL 2000 database on 32bit to an ERP 6.0 SR 2 release with a MS SQL 2005 database on 64bit. Both the database upgrade and the ERP upgrade were performed using VMware ESX server. A joint whitepaper "Use of Virtualization Technology with SAP" (Japanese version) has been published on SDN and provides further insights into the new way of lean upgrading. This project has been part of COILs ongoing efforts to address the topic of Sustainability.